Peter Tuthill (University of Sydney)

ELT: The Emperor's Large Telescope? - Peter Tuthill AAO/ATNF joint Colloquium

ATNF Marsfield Lecture Theatre

Abstract

Access to Extremely Large Telescopes with apertures greater than
20m is at the top of Australia's Decadal Plan wishlist for optical
astronomy. Despite this, there has been relatively little public
debate of the technical issues and no presentations (that I am aware
of) locally detailing the architectures and trade-offs for these
new generation telescopes. Do these projects offer value for money?
Do the three major competitor projects all offer similar capabilities
and risks? What are ELT's likely strengths and weaknesses? In this
talk, I present a grad-student level overview of some of the main
issues with the primary aim of sparking further and more widespread
community engagement with this critical component of our future
optical facilities.